


Waterloo

by TrivialPursuit



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: 1940s Pre-series AU, Aftermath of Violence, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Breakup, Crime Family AU, Death, F/M, Gen, Love, Mafia AU, Mental Health Issues, Mentions of suicide attempt, Romance, Spaced AU, Texting, Violence, Westeros' generally sketchy and corrupt institutions where shit gets kind of scary, mentions of abuse, messages, these vary from angsty to violent and sad to sappy as shit, warning for Joffrey Baratheon leaving lasting psychological scars on everything he touches
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-21
Updated: 2016-03-21
Packaged: 2018-05-28 06:22:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,239
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6318136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TrivialPursuit/pseuds/TrivialPursuit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fifteen more texts that were never sent in Westeros.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Waterloo

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [You Want a Better Story](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1650032) by [TrivialPursuit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TrivialPursuit/pseuds/TrivialPursuit). 



> Poem can be found here: http://backshelfpoet.tumblr.com/post/94959004308/1-we-were-in-tune-like-synchronised-swimmers  
> Thanks to Lyanna_Snow for suggesting it almost two years ago, which is about how long I've been puttering away at this.

 

 

 

"Realize that this love was not your trainwreck, was not the truck that flattened you, was not your Waterloo, did not cause massive hemorrhaging from a rusty knife. That love is still to come."

-Daphne Gottlieb, "Fifteen Ways to Stay Alive"

 

 

 

 

"(My my)

At Waterloo Napoleon did surrender,

(Oh yeah)

And I have met my destiny in quite a similar way. 

The history book on the shelf

Is always repeating itself."

-ABBA, "Waterloo"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_1\. We were in tune like synchronised swimmers._

  
_Now I learn to navigate the oceans on my own_. 

 

When the Starks give him his first phone she is the first person he wants to contact. 

He hates his father sometimes, after everything. 'I hope it was worth it,' he wants to tell him, 'I hope you're happy.' But these are words that will never leave his head, because the answer he gets will not make him happy. 

He hates his father, but he also loves him. Loves him the way all little boys, even when they're not so little anymore, love their fathers (even the fathers whose faces they can't remember) in a desperate, devoted way, craving any scrap of affection or approval that might be handed out. He will never hate his father as much as he loves him. 

Asha was always his favourite, even before Rodrik and Maron die in the Rebellion. Victarion teaches them how to sail their first boat, a tiny little dinghy called the  _Kraken's Pride_ , of which Asha was captain and Theon her first mate. When the adults got too loud he would clamber into her bed and she would read to him by the light of a flashlight. 

When they take him away he cries himself to sleep for a month, missing his big sister more then anyone else. 

He hates her for letting him go more than he loves her for everything else, of this he is certain. 

 

_[delete]_

_2\. I sobbed on public transport yesterday._

_I wanted to call you but then remembered_

  
_I’m not allowed to_.

 

The laugh bubbles up in her throat, forcing the air out of her lungs in a hysterical scream and she wonders for a second if she's gone mad. Then the sobs start in loud gasping wails ripped from her throat like an infant ripped from its mother's breast and she can't  _breathe_. 

The other people on the train stare at the mad woman wailing and she just wants them to stop, to leave her alone and stop fucking staring at her like she was some freak. He would know what to do, what to say to get them to leave her alone. Or maybe he'd make her laugh, make her forget about the rabble with their staring eyes and she so badly wants to call. She opens the text window in a moment of weakness, because she loves him like some fucking love song  and she wants everything to go back to the way it was Before. 

She fucked him and she fucked him over, and she doesn't regret it because she values her skin more than her heart and if he expected her to behave differently he deserves everything she did to him. 

She deletes the text because if she contacts him her deal goes down the drain and she has always been very fond of her skin. 

_[delete]_

_3\. The truth is: I know I’m better off_

_without you, but these memories_

  
_keep tricking me._  

 

She doesn't know his number, she realises later, she knows so much but she never knew his mobile number. What was the point though when he was only three tents down? What was the point when he was screaming bloody murder at her, strapped down in his hospital bed?

She remembers the way he always shined her boots, carefully, obsessively, always so that to toes of her boots could be used to check for food in her teeth in a pinch. She used to watch him lay out his brushes, polishes, sealants, waxes, cloths, boots carefully, almost ritualistically, every evening. It was like a religion to him; some of their comrades went to the sept or the godswood; Sandor Clegane polished boots.

She'd liked that about him; even though the rest of his appearance barely passed muster, his boots were alway immaculate. In fact, it was a wonder he hadn't been martialled out already; he had a strong reputation for insubordination, though this was balanced by an equally strong one for brutal efficiency and a lack of the morality that so frequently proved the undoing of even the best soldiers. 'The Hound' they called him; as with all of the the most popular nicknames, nobody was sure where it came from, but it stuck to him like glue. He was like a dog though, one of those mastiffs maybe, a glint of wildness in his eyes that made everyone wonder if he really had evolved to  _Canis lupus familiaris_. And she knew, just looking at him, that he was trouble, that if she touched him she'd get burnt in a bad way.

She wonders now if that's how Jaime Lannister knew, because suddenly her boots were pristine and then, just as suddenly, they weren't. He'd never liked Captain Lannister, always said he was a 'sisterfucking Lannister cunt' and she knows there's history there that she's not sure if she wants to touch or not. 

But he leaves her alone in the mud and filth of this year’s battlefield with Jaime Lannister and a thousand other cocksuckers just like him. And for that, she doesn't know if she'll ever quite forgive him. 

 

_[delete]_

_4\. You make me feel like a walking cliché._

_I need to stop romanticising leaving,_

_stop comparing your collar bones to_

_valleys and your freckles to constellations._

 

He pines for three days. Not because that is the grand total sum of his ability to act like some fucking sap in one of those shows Sansa and his mother like to watch, but because that's how much time Sansa gives him until he has to "woman the fuck up and get back on his fucking horse" (her words, not his). So that's what he does. For three days the two of them stay at home and watch all five seasons of  _Nightfort_ , consuming two pints of tiger tail and some vaguely frightening Wildling drink (probably brewed in a boot out of yak’s urine) that Jon sent them because that's what he wants and Sansa is a good sister. 

And then he gets back on his horse. He goes back to his pupillage at Tully & Sons, flirts with a pretty fellow pupil named Roslin and generally behaves like the young twenty-something he is on the weekends before dragging himself into work on Monday. After Roslin (who’s a  _Frey_ ) there’s Jeyne, who has hair almost as perfect as  _her_ , and Talisa, who is brilliant and studying to be a doctor. 

He calls his parents on Mondays and his mother asks about her brother and uncle, how he’s eating, whether he’s met a nice girl, and a thousand other things that mothers ask. His father asks about work and his mother asks about her family. He tells them things that aren’t quite the truth and his parents pretend to believe they’re getting the whole story. Sometimes he talks to Bran or Rickon, but mostly they’re in bed before he calls, for which some small part of him is grateful. He’s not sure he would know what to say.

He calls Jon on Tuesdays, because that’s the night Jon has off. It’s nice and they talk about Jon’s recent brevet and his latest case. Jon has mostly been out of the loop of all of the bullshit happening at home and it’s nice not to hear the concern that is replete in his parents’ voices.

He almost invariably calls Sansa at twelve-thirty-six every Friday and she patiently talks him down from calling  _her_ , something for which he will be sure every Saturday morning that he will never be able to quite repay her for.

Sometimes he composes texts to her when he’s drunk or tired or just feeling lonely. He wonders how she would respond.

 

_[delete]_

_5\. Can you jumpstart my heartbeat again?_

_I’m running so low on fuel._

 

She is so tired of the way people sneer at her, as if she is some painted whore.  _Don’t you have anything better to do?_  she wants to scream at them,  _You don’t know me so don’t you dare judge me_. Mostly though she says nothing.

Her grandmother taught her many things in life; how to fashion a spine of steel, where to slide the knife so that they never see it coming (metaphorically, of course; a Tyrell woman would never besmirch herself with the stain of spilt blood). But her grandmother was a woman of a different age, a woman who could withstand the casual cruelty required of her, a woman whose heart was hardened by the violence of her younger years.

She cannot remember the last time she felt full of anything. She cannot even be claimed to be full of sorrow or rage. Those emotions require more passion than she can muster up.

“We are Tyrells my love, we grow strong.” But what a burden it is, to be forever expected to grow and flourish, never being allowed to wilt and die. 

She does not cry because roses don’t cry, they absorb other maidens’ tears and use them to Grow Strong (those thrice-damned words once again). She also does not cry because she knows there is little she should cry over. She is alive. She grows and grows and does not die and she can even make herself forget that this is an endless life.

She is so tired.

(‘He is dead,’ her grandmother whispers in her ear, a small mercy as it spares her from hearing of it as her husband fucks her tonight, last night's bruises still livid on her skin. ‘He is dead and you are alive my dearest girl. Do not squander it’)

She stares at her phone, at the blinking cursor following the lines of text, and wonders what he would think of her.

 

_[delete]_

_6\. God knows I need to delete your number._

 

His pulse still races when he thinks of her, even now, after all they have done to each other. He wonders if it is the shared capacity for grandiose self-delusion that Tyrion liked to say runs in their blood. If it was some pre-existing flaw that made them think they were special enough to sin as they did without repercussion. He wonders if she knows the magnitude of their crimes, the depths at which they shall burn.

He is not a religious man. That would be too easy, too pure for his tastes. Life would be about doing what was right and good and moral, it would not be about blood and sex and the sound of her voice. Maybe that it a good thing, because the latter have always gotten him into far greater trouble then they were worth ( _except for her; she was always worth it_ ). He does not delude himself into believing that men of the cloth are righteous or good or moral, but he thinks, if he were Tyrion and thought and talked about these things, that those are not religious men, just because they have taken vows and made promises. Vows and promises have never been a guarantee of loyalty in his experience.

The only time he doesn’t think about her is when the bullets are flying and he’s almost dying  _again_  (She would be so pissed if he died; she wants a war hero covered in medals not some fucking corpse). 

He cannot picture a world where they are not inextricable. Who is he without her?

 

_[delete]_

_7\. Please don’t ever contact me again._

 

Her fingers tremble as she types the words, her gun still warm from the shots she fired into his back. She knows he isn’t dead because she is a good shot and she didn’t mean to kill him, she just meant to make it hurt. She hopes it hurts. She hopes he bleeds and hisses in pain. She hopes he has to get someone else to dig the slugs out of his back because there’s not fucking way he’s doing it himself. She hopes the before he asks someone he tries to dig around with a knife or a pair of pliers, doing more damage than good. She hopes his body hurts just as much as her heart does.

She does not hope he cries. Crying on him would be such a foreign expression, such a total admission of defeat and she does not want that, not for him. He has always been a fighter and she would not see that taken from him. 

She wonders if this is what love feels like.

Her gun is warm, like melted chocolate.

 

_[delete]_

_8\. Perhaps we were destined to falter_

_from the start,_

_just as Venice is doomed to sink._

 

She scrawls it out on a piece of Lords letterhead, using the last nub of lipstick in her pocketbook, her brand-new (though of course not actually new; it’s one of his family's heirloom rings that she picked out months ago; hardly heirloom when Jeyne Arryn has a ring worn by five generations, but such in the burden of marrying into new money) engagement ring glinting in the light as her hand moves across the page. She can see him down in the gallery, staring across the room with a leonine smile twisting across his lips as Lord Stark bellows and shakes his fist. She wonders if Lord Stark knows how he shall be eaten alive by the man sitting opposite him.

Luthor sits a few seats down from him, every so often glancing up in the gallery, as if to reassure himself she's still there. She was the one who insisted they come, flattering him with her talk of statecraft and oratory powers. In truth, he only comes to the Lords when the Whip requires him to, spending the rest of the time drinking and gambling at one of his clubs. These are habits she will of course have to change, but Luthor is besotted with her, the stupid man, and it will not be difficult. 

He is painfully stupid, her intended. It's a wonder he graduated from anything, though the Great War probably saved him; the Army would take anyone willing to enlist, desperate as it was for any body to throw in front of Robert Baratheon’s machine guns.

She stares down at her intended now and cannot help but feel another tendril of loathing wind around her heart. Her children will be better, she knows, she will keep them from their father’s imbecility and she will make them clever and ambitious. She will claw the Tyrell family out of the hole they have dug for themselves and, gods willing, she will see a grandchild on the throne.

She absolutely does not think about the glorious, brilliant children she would have had with that golden lion; children that would take over the world in one fell swoop. She could have the world in the palm of her hand with him by her side.

Her marriage is the most anticipated of the season and Society has already given her a new name, her _nom de guerre_ , she likes to joke: the Queen of Thornes. 

She crumples the note up, making sure not to get any lipstick on her gloves, and drops it in the wastepaper basket.

 

_[delete]_

_9\. Speaking of Venice,_

_you should visit while there_

_is still time._

 

He does not consider himself to be a particularly sentimental man, but his sister is a clever woman, with sharp eyes and a quick mind. It is almost a pity, he thinks, that she was not born a man, otherwise she would have made a formidable politician or anything else she set her mind to.

The note is crumpled, with waxy red smears on the folds is overlaid by a ‘ _you’re welcome, darling_ ’ written in his sister’s elegant cursive. He squints, trying to make out letters and words out of the vermillion strokes, Only one person he knows wears that shade, a shade that was, not so long ago, decorating his pulse point like a brand.

He pulls out a sheet of paper, already planning his reply. He thinks she will enjoy this, not so much the intrusion on her privacy, but the game. It is a reminder to her and her upstart steward of a fiancé of his power and omnipotence. It will rile her, get under her skin; it will make her cruel and vicious and she will be  _glorious_. 

Joanna is beautiful. And he loves her. She is kind and has all the qualities of a perfect wife. She comes from good stock (his own, but they are second cousins, her father has his own title, and it has been done before) with a large dowry and graces from one of the best finishing schools in the country. And he loves her. 

And yet. 

The author of the note is not kind and lacks the qualities most estimable in marital and maternal office, though she is  _very_  beautiful. She does not come from stock half so good, and has a smaller dowry, though she attended the same finishing school. 

And yet. 

He knows with the note's author by his side he could hold the country in the palm of his hand. With their minds combined together they could make the world scream in agony or ecstasy, whichever they desired. He knows that with her by his side nothing would be impossible. Both of them could have everything they'd ever dreamed of and more. 

And yet. 

He thinks about beautiful, kind, perfect Joanna and crumples the paper in his hand. The vermilion lipstick smears across his fingers. 

 

_[delete]_

_10\. You made the words_

_feel just right. Now they spin_

  
_off kilter._  

 

She stares at the phone in her hand, borrowed from the girl in the next room over (' _Anorexia_ ,' Mya had whispered as she'd show her around, ' _She always has a rich dad who gets her contraband and eating disorders get the good food and are almost always willing to share_.'). Five weeks in and she's still not really sure why she's here, though the thick ridges of barely formed scar tissue running up and down her arms serve as a constant reminder. She's not really sure if anyone really knows why they're there as everyone seems to be on a similar cocktail of drugs that leave you pliable and empty. She has not felt anything in weeks and it is glorious, reduced to the memory of emotions, viewed with a sort of detached apathy that is utterly marvellous (or would be marvellous if she could feel that). 

Along with the lines down her arms (which she will later tell Dr Colemon was supposed to be a river, like the one from where her mother is from and she is not quite sure if this is a lie or not), her back is criss-crossed with older scars that climb up her back like climbing roses, wrapping around her neck and shoulders, making her body a trellis for his violence to bloom on. ( _These scars are not roses and they cannot be made beautiful._ ) 

Before he made her ugly, he told her she was beautiful. He told her that she would be the brightest jewel in the nation's crown, she would glitter and sparkle, drawing all the light. Mostly though he told her she would be a queen. And what a magnificent queen she would have been.

(She remembers the bite of the belt on her back, tearing the soft, pale flesh of the spine that he used to like to press kisses along, one for every vertebra, watching the ridges of bone move as she twisted her spine different ways, waiting for his canvass to take the perfect shape.)

Sometimes she still places a book on her head and walks around her room to practice for when he crowns her queen (although now she uses the DSM instead of  _Who’s Who_ ). It was what she's been preparing for her whole life, to be a queen. She would be kind and gentle, loved by all. People would hold her up as the model for a royal consort. 

More than that, she had been so sure of their happiness, that he loved her and she loved him and nothing would change that. She had been sure that together they would be gloriously happy, with half a dozen little princes and princesses with her hair and his eyes and lips. He was a certainty, like death or taxes, how she had defined herself since she could first understand the idea of princes and princesses. 

Her life had been beautiful, full of hope and promise and this is what her beautiful life has come to, five square metres and six pills twice a day, hair dyed a muddy brown, and a quite fog instead of real life. 

The orderly gently slides the phone out of her hand. She knows she’ll get in trouble later, but right now it’s time for her treatment.

 

_[delete]_

_11\. You had little nicknames for me._

_I secretly miss being called moon shell,_

  
_tiger, fairy nymph._  

 

Sometimes, she hates him with every fibre of her being. Sometimes she can't stop crying. And those are the good days. Mostly she can't remember a time before the war. She was not young when it started, in her tenth year of life, old enough to remember, but it was so long ago and much has happened. He belongs Before, in that mystical time unsullied by blood and violence. If she concentrates very hard and ignores the pain that inevitably comes with thinking of her past she can picture kind eyes and a smile. 

She still has his number programmed into her phone, meticulously transferred from update to update and if asked about it she could not say why. Their chief means of communication was not by phone, there are no precious text messages saved, no sentimental voicemails taking up space, no photos, notes, or other nostalgia-evoking bytes.

On the good days, she cannot stop crying. On the bad ones she barely thinks about him at all.

 

_[delete]_

_12\. Maybe we were just a collection_

_of dead ends and false starts._

_We should have been disqualified_

_from the beginning._

 

It’s an amazing flat, the sort that anyone who thought that two bedrooms and no recent bedbug infestations made a flat luxurious would kill for. Plus it’s marketed for what seems like a ridiculously little amount of money (still not so cheap that he’d be able to afford it on his meagre salary from the comic book shop alone). That is the only reason he considers the scheme, cooked up by his sister in an attempt to get both her roommate out of her flat and her brother out of her parents’ basement (‘So that Mum will stop bloody calling me about how you’re throwing your life away wallowing in artificial cheese dust and marijuana smoke. Plus she needs a roommate, and it's the least I can do, considering Willas is moving in with me moving in with me.’) in one fell swoop. There are parts of him that suspect his outwardly sweet sister might be hiding a should of pure evil, but he doesn't truly believe it until he's standing in front of the battered and slightly askew gate, the cracked pathway leading up to the flats stretching out in front of him like the yellow brick road, staring at the leaf of newsprint his sister had shoved in his hands on the way out the door. 

' _Spacious two bedroom apartment, fully furnished._  


_£90 a week._

  
_Professional couple only_.'

But it's already too late because he can see her trotting towards him on alarmingly precarious shoes, eyes glued firmly to her phone yet somehow never wobbling.

'We've been dating for eight months. I'm a vegetarian, allergic to strawberries and penicillin, currently doing PR in for the government. Your sister introduced us and our first date was a picnic in the park. I take my tea black, no sugar.’ She says all this without looking up from her phone, where she is texting furiously 

'This isn't going to work. They're going to know. They’re going to take one look at us and see that we’ve barely ever met before, let alone are a reliable couple to whom they should rent a flat.’ he feels the panic begin to twist its way around his stomach. 

She is right, just as she is, he will learn about everything pertaining to deceit and manipulation. 

He thinks about this as he lies in bed, toying with his phone, waiting to hear the sound of her stumble in from her date at some ungodly hour. He thinks about the look on her face at her birthday when he brought Val along and Lysa started screaming. He thinks about how much he hates the boys she dates and how he secretly hopes they will both end up heartbroken and alone in this tiny flat forever. 

 

_[delete]_

_13\. Grief is the same in any language._

_I mourn you. I collect flowers and place them_

  
_on your grave in the cemetery._  

 

The statue atop the grave is cold and hard despite the master sculptor’s skill. The smooth granite lacks the warmth the subject exuded in real life and the drilled eyes are hollow and empty. In life she was beautiful, full of fire and passion, but stone has made her cruel; the smile etched into her lips is mocking rather than playful, hands made to welcome instead warn visitors away.

It is always a shame, they say, when the beautiful and the young die before their time, and so they said of this woman, when she was put in the ground many years ago. This grave is not old, the stone unveiled a few months ago and it has not yet had time to gain the layer of dust and grime that pervades throughout the family crypt.

The young man stands before the statue, fingers yearning to caress her face once more, but he knows the granite will give him no relief and pulls a phone out of his pocket, laying it at the base of the grave along with a bouquet of white lilies and a note.

 

_[delete]_

_14\. You are so much more than human._

 

She stands, in her ice-white suit that almost glows in the dark alley, a sword, the sword that had been the trademark of her father ever since he was a young man working collections for Jon Arryn, in her hand. The blade is already scarlet and he feels dread twist up inside of him. He can see his sister’s beautiful hair tumbled across the filthy concrete of the alley, sitting in a puddle of rapidly reddening water. He is the last one left, everyone else in the alley was cut down by the hail of bullets that they could not avoid, hemmed in on all sides by the back ends of buildings.

His laboured breathing and the click of her heels are the only sounds in the alley, both of which seem magnified as her feet take up his field of vision. Her shoes are tall, impossibly tall, designed to make her already imposing person tower over everyone else. They’re the sort of shoes she wasn’t yet able to walk in when they first met and he remembers her and his sister mincing down the hallway in shoes like that, thick dictionaries balanced on their heads, laughing every time one of them made a mistake. He cannot help but think how impossible those memories seem to be, as the woman who used to be a girl with dictionaries balanced on her head stalks towards him as if he is a rabbit that she will eat for lunch.

The toe of her shoe is right next to his nose, and the aroma of the alley assails him, though underneath it he can still smell the leather, moulded to her feet like a second skin. If he strains, he can smell musk and jasmine, the same perfume she had worn since she was sixteen, painfully thin and terrified of anything opulent.

She squats down, resting her sword along the curve of his Adam’s apple, bending close so that he can feel her breath on his ear.

‘I want you to know I love you. I want you to know that all of it was real and that I will always love you. But the things I have done to your family, the things I will do to you, and to others, these things I do for love.’ She presses her lips to his, the taste of his blood and her waxy red lipstick mingling. They devour each other, as if she were not the predator and he were not the prey. They consume each other, leaving them both gasping and breathless. It takes him a minute to realise that he is breathless not only because of the kiss but because air in now whistling out through a gash in his neck.

He wonders if she thinks this is what kindness is, if leaving him almost, but not quite, dead, is as close as she can come to mercy now. He fumbles for his phone, the wound in his neck fluttering with exertion as he laboriously types out a text to a number he has not called in five years.

Everything goes black before he can hit send.

 

_[delete]_

_15\. Despite all of this, there is some_

_beautiful solitude in sleeping with_

_only my heartbeat_

  
_for company_. 

 

His sister was beautiful, he thinks. That is what he knows for certain, that she was beautiful among a world of filth. He does not remember much else, for it has been so long and he is so very tired, but he remembers that.

Sometimes he thinks she was kind. He thinks he remembers her giving food to starving children and loving even the most vicious dogs. He thinks she wove flower garlands and danced and sang when their father returned home and cried when one of the dogs in the kennel had to be put down.

Other times he thinks she was cruel. He thinks she did not mind climbing over others to get to the top, that she would have murdered him if it suited her purpose. He thinks she might have been unstoppable, if only because she would not know how to stop, always wanting more than what she had. 

‘A beautiful princess,’ he thinks somebody calls her once.

‘No.’ She tells them, five and already more regal than half the ladies in the land, ‘No, I am the queen.’

‘Very well, your majesty, and who is your king?’ the person asks, humouring her, expecting her to say something silly, something childish, like her father or one of the princes, underestimating everything that she is.

‘I don't need a king.’ She says sweetly, already planning her long and glorious reign.

It was such a long time ago and he wonders if she remembers him.

 

_[delete]_


End file.
